Blur Social
A social blogging platform for creator to monetize
We are at a point in development where we having something usable. At this point we have a sign up list and some friends that are willing to be test users, and even though I don't feel like we have built out some of our key value areas, I do think it's time to have real users test and give feed back.
But before we do this we are doing some final upgrades and refactoring. As I mentioned we have a system that is the foundation of what we are building: a social blogging platform. But right now we have been focusing on optimizing the platform, making sure images load quickly, setting up formatting for blog posts, and most importantly refactoring the way we are getting data to make sure everything loads very quickly and reduces our calls to the server.
It's a very exciting time for us because we can't wait to work with our users and show them what we've built.
Getting so much closer every day, in just a few weeks we will start letting friends test out some of our features. Although we won't be feature complete until probably June, we will be at a point where we have basic blogging and subscription features. Our goal is to let friends start testing it and as we release new features we can gather feedback until we get to the point where we feel we have the MVP ready to release to the general public.
In other news, I have been trying to promote and get the word out so I started posting some explainer videos on TikTok. I'm not sure if any other indie hackers are using TikTok, but I think it's a great platform to get exposure.
Check out my explainer video here
https://www.tiktok.com/@andrewblur/video/6939372009654619397
Wow so much has happened in the past few months and we have been really busy.
The fun stuff first. We are about to launch to family and friends to test and use a very light version of our product!
Right now we aren't fully-featured and not quite to the point where we can call it an MVP but we do have a nice social-blogging system worked out and want to share that system with a small group to test out.
The Tech Stuff: we have had to make some hard decisions in January when we realized the backend we were building using NodeJS and Mongo was just not getting us where we needed to be fast enough. We ended up pausing on backend work for a few days and did some research. Ultimately we decided to make a major change to Hasura and Postgres for our backend and database, at the same time we had also moved from AWS to Digitalocean.
All of these decisions have already paid off greatly. The move to Digitalocean was a breeze and made launching our app incredibly easier. The move to Hasura for all of our CRUD functionality was even easier we rebuilt our full back-end plus new functionality in one day.
At this point, we are very happy with all of the tech we are using and feel very positive about the product we are about to deliver.
We have been coding for about 3 weeks now, sometimes it feels like we are moving fast and other times I worry we are going too slow. So far we have built out a backend, our database, and some front-end, we also implemented a cool auth system that uses an emailed magic link like slack. I'm very excited and I think we will have our first push to a live environment at the end of this week.
After a few months of designing, documenting, and some great conversations we are starting to code this week! We have one developer working on this full time and I (Andrew) will be contributing code as much as I can. We are very excited to get this idea finally started.
The idea for Blur is the combination of multiple ideas I've had over the years to help artists promote and monetize their work. But I actually started designing and documenting it this year. Then I met my Co-founder who really helped grow the idea into something we were ready to build!
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